What Cuba Thought of Major Lazer's Historic Havana Show

Diplo is wearing a Cuban baseball jersey and waving a Cuban flag. He is in front of a crowd of hundreds of thousands of Cubans (the government newspaper reported over 400,000), many of them teenagers wearing American baseball caps or American flag tank tops. There’s a group of high schoolers with painted faces holding signs that read, “Cuba <3 u.”

“It’s amazing because we have never received someone like him,” one of them told me. “We love American music.”

Major Lazer played Sunday at Havana’s Tribuna Antiimperialista, a stage built in 2000 as a monument to victims of American injustices. Behind the stage there is a field of flagpoles that were once used to block a view of the American government building in Cuba, which was then flashing anti-Cuban propaganda in the windows. The flags were taken down after the ticker turned off in 2009. On Sunday, only a Cuban flag was visible in front of the building, an embassy since leaders announced normalized relations between the two countries last spring.

The show is a warm-up for Musicabana, a free festival that will bring international acts like Sean Paul and the French-Cuban duo Ibeyi to the country this May. Fabien Pisani, the son of famous Cuban musician Pablo Milanés, is the founder and co-producer of the festival, and he grew up playing in a park that used to occupy the stretch of waterfront where the Tribuna was built. The Major Lazer show was a Musicabana production as well; I ask Pisani what it feels like to host Cuba’s biggest party in years—led by an American act, no less—at a venue he saw converted into a symbol of resisting American influence.

“Nobody cares,” Pisani said at a bar late Sunday following the show, relighting his cigar. For him, the Tribuna is a place to have a large free concert. It’s on the water and cheaper because there’s already a stage set up. But that doesn’t stop him from seeing how the concert is part of an important transitional moment in Cuban history.

Not only is Major Lazer the first major EDM act to play Cuba, theirs is the first major performance by any American act on Cuban soil since Audioslave played the Tribuna in 2005. Since the U.S. and Cuba reached some semblance of diplomacy last year, Cuba has seen an influx of American tourists and money to the island, and the government has made it easier for Cubans to start small businesses and buy real estate. Amid these changing economic and political conditions, Pisani hopes Musicabana will bring more international music to the country and help with Cuba “finding who we are as a nation."

Despite sparse, expensive internet primarily in hotels and special parks, international music makes it on to Cuban cellphones and computers. Many young Cubans at the concert said they get music from the "paquete," a weekly dump of foreign music, movies, TV shows, and magazines distributed hand-to-hand on hard drives. Major Lazer hits, especially "Lean On," have been on it recently.

On Sunday evening, the massive crowd jumped and pumped their fists along to Major Lazer's thumping bass and Caribbean-influenced rhythms. "Where are my Cubans?" the group's Jamaica-born, Florida-dwelling DJ Walshy Fire asked in Spanish to a roar from the packed Tribuna, while Jillionaire (who is Trinidadian) DJ'ed behind. Wearing the Cuban jersey, Walshy Fire told them to jump (salta, salta) while messages of “universal brotherhood" flashed on a video screen. Teenage girls in crop tops waved giant red and blue flags bearing Major Lazer's “peace globe” symbol on it, which the group circulated at the show.

“We came to bring peace,” Diplo announced. The message was quite a contrast from the last big concert at the Tribuna, when the Puerto Rican hip-hop group Calle 13 played in 2010 and screamed profanities at the U.S. building behind them. Diplo said seeing Calle 13 perform in Havana, as well as Cuban influence growing up in South Florida, made him want to come to Cuba. The concert was entirely self-funded, with the New York Times reporting the costs for Major Lazer to be around $150,000, per their rep. In fact, planning for the concert started 14 months ago, before major recent developments like Obama’s visit to Cuba and the announcement of the Rolling Stones' free concert, to be held in a Havana stadium on March 25.

Major Lazer served the audience well, remixing American music that's popular in Cuba—like Justin Bieber’s “Sorry” and Macklemore’s “Can’t Hold Us"—with reggaeton and salsa rhythms. Jamaican singer Nyla joined the group for her part on their recent hit "Light It Up," but it was "Lean On" that got the most Cubans to sing along. By that point, the crowd had been raging for hours; three Cuban DJs prominent in the Havana’s electronic music scene (DJ Reitt, Adroid, Iván Lejardi), as well as a Rumba band, served as Major Lazer's opening acts.

Throughout the weekend, Major Lazer visited various Havana hotspots and dance clubs. They did a 20-minute set at the historic Marina Hemingway Saturday night and a 90-minute aftershow at the two-year-old Fabrica del Arte Cubano, an art gallery, music venue, and bar. Both of those venues are established and financially out of reach for many Cubans. The ten-dollar cover at the Marina would eat up a fourth of a typical Cuban’s monthly salary. The two-dollar cover at Fabrica is nothing for the tourists and the foreign students that make up a sizeable portion of the club’s attendance most nights, but it remains a splurge for many Cubans.

Diplo also met with about 40 Cuban DJs and music students on Saturday morning to discuss, in part, the challenges facing musicians there. In addition to internet troubles, specific equipment is difficult to find. At the meeting, Diplo spoke about sending music to a mixer after he finishes, an unfamiliar concept to most of the DJs present.

At a press conference held Saturday with Major Lazer, Musicabana leaders, and a Cuban music official, Diplo compared Cuba's electronic scene to “New York in the '80s," given the scrappiness and creativity of the DJs and the prevalence of DIY venues. DJ Reitt, the first act on Sunday’s lineup, runs one called Madriguera. Every Sunday night, young Cubans pack into the courtyard of a one-story building in Havana, and cover the roof too. They listen to local DJs and show off dance moves they've been practicing all week.

The details of the concert were, in Pisani's words, “really fucking difficult” to organize with the Cuban government, but that the enthusiasm of young people—some of whose parents were making the call on whether the concert would happen at all—made it easier. After the show, large groups of young Cubans danced and sang in the emptying Tribuna. One cluster was making a video on a small camera and pretending to do interviews. They said the show was "suuuuper bien" and that I look like Justin Bieber. With spirits high, I sang "Sorry" with them for the camera.

Emma Torriente McPherson, 51, was four rows back with her 16-year-old daughter for the concert. McPherson said she listens to Major Lazer when her daughter plays it in the house and said the show was “magnifico.” “They should have many more,” she added.

Diplo seemed to agree, telling the crowd that the group wants to come back every year.

The Musicabana team is committed to making their concerts a two-sided cultural exchange, Chris Wangro, the show’s senior producer, told me. That means working as much as possible with local Cuban companies in addition to local musicians. For this show, Major Lazer only brought 15 small cases of DJ equipment, Wangro said. (By comparison, the Rolling Stones will bring truckloads of their equipment when they perform in Havana later this month.) Major Lazer used four sound companies, a film and lighting company, and two different pyrotechnic companies. The group’s private security worked with Cuban security for the event. Police and army officials manned the borders, and aggressively pulled some drunk and disruptive concertgoers out of the crowd.

Wangro said that running a show in Cuba, working with a number of different state companies, is a stark contrast to New York City, where he served as head of special events for the Parks Department. That’s especially true now because rules are changing regarding foreign operations in Cuba.

“It’s a learning process for everybody,” he said. “Things are changing so fast here that everybody has to figure it out as they go.”

As the sun set over the American embassy on Sunday evening, Diplo asked everyone in the crowd to put peace signs in the air for a photo. The message he sent before he took it wasn’t political, however.

“We’re going to show that Havana is the best place in the whole world to have a party right now.”